Results of the consultation

It’s been really helpful for us to collect information about our users. Knowing things like 'what our users do' and 'how you use our data' helps us to tailor our statistics to your needs.

Most users categorised themselves as working within the ‘business’ sector. Lower numbers (between 3 and 7) reported working in sectors relating to:

local and national government

voluntary

journalist

those classified as ‘other’

The next part of our survey focussed on what you use the data for. We found that the majority reported using the data for general background information. Despite this, all categories were chosen by at least 5 users. These categories were:

research

monitoring

decision making

inclusion in reports

writing briefing

policy development

benchmarking

modelling and/or forecasting

do not use

We want to make sure we’re producing tables that are useful to you, so one question asked which tables you used within the annual publication. All were used, but the table with the most users was the ‘historic data’ table (A8 if you want the table number).

The next part of our survey asked users to give feedback on how satisfied you were with several aspects of the publication. These charts show that the respondents provided far more positive feedback compared to negative feedback.

Further comments

Some users provided feedback through the free-text comment boxes, which gave suggestions of what you’d like to see in further publications. The main themes from the comments were:

further analysis of SIC data

questioning the quality of the data

more promotion of the statistics

to make the data available in a machine-readable format

How we’ll use your feedback

From your comments and feedback, it looks like our official statistics won’t be changing too much. We were told that all the tables were used by several respondents, so we will continue producing these.

Although most respondents provided positive feedback, we’ll continue to keep in touch with our users to keep the data relevant.

You said you would like…

…so we will

To see more promotion of the official statistics.

We’ll continue to work with our external communications team to promote our statistics on our social media platforms. This enables our data to reach a wider audience usual. We’ll also write occasional blogs to promote our official statistics. These blogs will include the key messages of the release.

Data to be made available in open, machine-readable formats such as JSON, XML or LibreOffice.

We’re investigating the feasibility of making the data available on request in these alternative formats. We’ll provide contact details for requests in due course.

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